Today, cruise passengers who want photographic mementos of their experience are forced to look through thousands of pictures presented in a gallery in order to find the few pictures of themselves and their family. This time-consuming process turns what should be an exciting and fun experience of viewing family photographs into a boring slog through thousands of photographs of strangers. This and similar forms of distribution are used in other forms of event photography as well, from ski slopes, at resorts, and at certain theme parks. These large galleries with undifferentiated photographs serve to frustrate patrons and to reduce sales. Furthermore, these forms of distribution prevent patrons from sharing images with others through email or online photo collections. Also, these distribution means prevent patrons from digitally proofing and altering photographs, as they now do with their image collections on home computers. Because patrons only buy what is already printed, they prevent patrons from selecting photographs for creating photo albums of their entire cruise, which albums could be in the form of virtual image albums that let patrons view and manage images more easily, or alternatively, as physical bound photographic albums. In addition, patrons cannot decide whether or not to share photographs with other people to whom they have a relationship as there are only a limited number of photographs printed, and galleries prevent patrons from protecting their photographs from casual exposure to unrelated people.
Some of these issues are addressed by the use of facial recognition in automatically indexing images. Facial recognition is well-known in the prior art, and a number of commercial facial recognition software programs are available, including those from Cognitec (Dresden, Germany), Identix (Minnetonka, Minn.) and Viisage (Billerica, Mass.). These companies produce facial recognition engines, which provide a simple result—given two faces, they provide a score that indicates the similarity of the two faces, or alternatively, the likelihood that the two faces come from the same person. These facial recognition engines are extremely accurate if the faces are presented in a standardized manner—the faces facing forward, glasses removed, with a neutral expression. As the face deviates from this standard format, the accuracy of the facial recognition engine decreases substantially. In order to correct for these inaccuracies in the facial recognition engines, it is possible to assist the facial recognition engine using statistical regularities of the image collection. For example, on a cruise ship, related people tend to show up regularly in the same photographs. If a first person is recognized reliably in a photograph, it is likely that a second person who cannot be reliably recognized is in another photograph with the first person, thus aiding in the recognition. This improved indexing is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,819,783 to Goldberg, et al.
The use of facial recognition in distributing images in event photography has been partially addressed in the prior art, and in particular, U.S. Pat. No. 6,526,158 to Goldberg describes the manner in which facial recognition can be used to collect images from patrons in a public venue and to provide these to the patron in response to a request from the patron.
Distributing event photographs to patrons in these public venues still presents important problems. For example, much of the prior art assumes that the interface between the patron and the distribution system is a computer, such as in a kiosk. However, many patrons do not either know how to use a computer, or are reluctant to do so. In addition, providing kiosks in sufficient numbers to handle patron flow could be too expensive, or there may not be sufficient room to do so. Furthermore, in selling, it is well-known that providing the patron with the actual product (in this case a photograph) is more effective than providing them with a facsimile of the product on a computer screen. Finally, for reasons of timing, production efficiencies of scale, or product quality (i.e. kiosk reproductions tend to be lower quality dye sublimation prints), it may be more effective to print a photograph in batch mode, rather than to wait for a patron to request the photograph in a computer interaction.
For these and other reasons, in many cases it is preferable to print collections of photographs in batch, and to present these to patrons. This can be difficult, however, because of the volume of photographs involved. In a cruise ship scenario, for example, tens of thousands of photographs can be taken during a week's cruise. In current practice, these photographs are placed into a gallery, where patrons are then asked to find their photographs. The time required to find these photographs is large and thereby discouraging to patrons, the patrons may not find all of their photographs thereby reducing sales. Furthermore, the cruise lines are forced to devote extra room to the gallery in order to handle the large number of photographs and to handle peak periods where hundreds of people can be in the gallery scanning for the photographs.
Another limitation of the distribution of event photography is that patrons are organized into hierarchical groups. That is, a woman might be on a cruise of thousands of people with her immediate family, which is part of a family reunion with her parents and the families of her two brothers, some of which are also part of a church group. The woman may want to see not only images of her immediate family, but also of the family reunion, or possibly of the entire church group. It would be useful if the woman could indicate which groups of people for which she is interested in seeing images—this is currently not possible, since it would be prohibitively difficult for her to indicate which of the thousands of people on the cruise that she did or did not want share photographs with. Accomplishing this task would be significantly facilitated if the system had a sense of the groups of which the woman was a member, and to allow her to make choices about those groups, rather than every individual person.
It is to these and other issues that the present invention is directed.